Category Archives: UN

“Sovereign multilateralism” is how a GOPer described the “benefits” to ordinary Americans from international agreements and treaties.

This MSNBC Republican (flogging a book) was incredulous that President Trump would dare to be so offish to NATO members. Did he miss last year’s election? We wanted out of NATO.

Candidate Trump got considerable support for his promises to violate this or the other agreement between the U.S. government and various supranational systems. Successive U.S. governments have ceded the rights of Americans to these supra-state systems. Deplorables wanted much less of it.

Granted, radical libertarians will contend that the Constitution itself is the thin edge of the wedge that has allowed successive U.S. governments to cede the rights of Americans to these supra-state systems. Specifically, the “Supremacy Clause” in Article VI states that all treaties made by the national government shall be “the supreme Law of the Land,” and shall usurp the laws of the states.

Either way, all libertarian-minded conservatives who yearn to breathe free should want the chains with which others have bound Americans dissolved. Johnson and Weld object to Trump renegotiating agreements or optimizing them for Americans, on the statist grounds that to so do would violate agreements that by their nature sideline the American people. Smashing or refashioning these agreements and reclaiming national, state and individual sovereignty, as Trump proposes, is certainly more libertarian than the Johnson-Weld worldview allows.

NIKKI HALEY, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.: So, there’s multiple priorities. It’s — getting Assad is not the only priority. So, what we are trying to do is, obviously, defeat ISIS. Secondly, we don’t see a peaceful Syria with Assad in there. Thirdly, get the Iranian influence out. And then, finally, move towards a political solution because at the end of the day, this is a complicated situation. There are no easy answers and a political solution is going to have to happen.

But we know that it is not going to be — there is not any sort of option where political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime. It just — if you look at his actions, if you look at the situations, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad.

TAPPER: Well, of course, it’s hard to. Is it the position of the Trump administration that he cannot be ruler of Syria any more? Regime change is the policy?

HALEY: Well, regime change is something that we think is going to happen because all of the parties are going to see that Assad is not the leader that needs to be taking place for Syria.

Haley also told CNN last week the — rather last week the strike could be followed by more action if necessary.

HALEY: He won’t stop here. If he needs to do more, he will do more. So, really, now, what happens depends on how everyone responds to what happened in Syria and make sure that we start moving towards a political solution and we start finding peace in that area.

President Trump has hired individuals who do not articulate the principles he ran on. Gov. Nikki Haley, for one. When the rest open their mouths to speak, too many sound nothing like what was promised. The generals scare me. America First? Where? In Yemen? Hiring different perspectives in business could well be a strength. But it’s not a strength when it comes to politics and policy. In politics you want a team that shares a political philosophy.

Prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol shared his election-year hallucinations with the nation. From the ashes of the Republican primaries would rise a man to stand for president against victor Donald J. Trump, a Sisyphean task that has been attempted and failed by 17 other worthies.

This individual is David French, an attorney, a decorated Iraq War veteran, and writer for the decidedly “Against Trump” National Review. Curiously, Kristol’s independent candidate is a “devout social conservative,” an evangelical who questions the merits of “de-stigmatizing” homosexuality, rejects the progressive premise upon which the transgender, potty wars are being waged, and would keep women out of combat.

Why, then, would a “relatively secular faction within the Republican Party,” the neoconservatives, make common cause with the Party’s fundamentalist wing? Jeet Heer, senior editor at the New Republic,asks this question—a riddle familiar to students and scholars of American conservatism.

The alliance, or, rather, the master-servant relationship between neoconservatives and the Religious Right is an old one. Political evangelists have long since been brought to heel by the Washington-based neoconservatives. “Most on the Religious Right have hardly resisted such cooptation, having perhaps nowhere to go financially, politically or professionally,” wrote Dr. Paul Gottfried in The Conservative Movement, his 1993 prophetic, forensic examination of the roots of the conservative crack-up.

French is vested in an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy. His impressive military credentials, in his role as a tool of democratic internationalism, are meant to provide a stark contrast to Trump’s nativism. At least as Kristol sees it.

French is no American Firster in the way Donald Trump is. For a man can don the uniform and fight Caesar’s wars, but that doesn’t necessarily make him someone who puts his country first—unless one conflates the interests and well-being of ordinary Americans with wars of choice plotted by the New York-Washington axis of power. This error is not one Mr. Trump commits. While the presumptive Republican Party’s nominee clearly has great affection for America’s veterans, he doesn’t love all the wars they’ve been ordered to fight. …